Krauthammer: Schwartz is Right

I immensely admire and respect the work of Charles Krauthammer, one of my favorite conservative pundits. Often, when I have been aghast at the conventional "wisdom" about one news story or another (e.g., that Bush won the election on "moral values"), the voice of reason coming from a Charles Krauthammer column has been music to my ears.

This is not one of those times. In his latest column, "In Defense of Certainty" (via RealClear Politics), Krauthammer only seems to be questioning the conventional wisdom when he is, in fact, only providing an excellent example of it.

One of Krauthammer's greatest strengths is his ability to penetrate directly to the essence of an issue. Here, he is addressing what he only half-correctly sees to be the cause of today's moral crisis: the militant skepticism of the left.

The Op-Ed pages are filled with jeremiads about believers--principally evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics--bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy. Now I am not much of a believer, but there is something deeply wrong--indeed, deeply un-American--about fearing people simply because they believe. It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you. And if that contrary view happens to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, the very public advocacy of that view becomes a violation of the U.S. constitutional order.

What nonsense. The campaign against certainty is merely the philosophical veneer for an attempt to politically marginalize and intellectually disenfranchise believers. Instead of arguing the merits of any issue, secularists are trying to win the argument by default on the grounds that the other side displays unhealthy certainty or, even worse, unseemly religiosity.

He is making half of an excellent point. Today's mainstream secularists are, in the main, apparently allergic to the idea of certainty, which they equate with religious faith. And they are at war with those of us who do hold that certainty is possible.

But Krauthammer, while he calls himself "not much of a believer," refers to the militant agnostics of the left as "secularists" throughout his piece as if he agrees with the basic premise of these leftists: that moral certainty requires some measure of religious belief. Interestingly, he ends his piece by paying lip service to the religious beliefs of our deistic Founding Fathers, as if the universality of the principles for which they fought depended on religion.

You want certainty? You want religiosity? How about a people who overthrow the political order of the ages, go to war and occasion thousands of deaths in the name of self-evident truths and unalienable rights endowed by the Creator? That was 1776. The universality, the sacredness and the divine origin of freedom are enshrined in our founding document. The Founders, believers all, signed it. Thomas Jefferson wrote it. And not even Jefferson, the most skeptical of the lot, had the slightest doubt about it.

Krauthammer's "not much of a believer" to the contrary, the piece is an excellent example of why today's intellectual discourse desperately needs a secular voice of certainty. A false dichotomy -- between total skepticism and certainty only through faith -- is circumscribing our entire public discussion of morality. On the basis of the widespread acceptance of this dichotomy, the question is not, "How do we determine what is right," but "Do we accept moral commandments on faith, or embrace our intellect at the expense of morality?" The skeptics, by thus equating secularism with amorality, have succeeded in portraying reason as unfit to answer moral questions. It is the supposed requirement that morality be accepted on blind faith, and that reason cannot be applied to moral questions that is at the root of today's moral crisis.

In truth, neither side of this debate is correct about morality. How does a skeptic act from day to day with no guidance at all? At the whim of the moment. How does the religionist know the right course of action? By accepting arbitrary dicta on faith. Neither has found principles derived from nature with which to inform his choices, to live his life.

Contrast this to the Peter Schwartz piece on "Moral Values without Religion" currently featured at Capitalism Magazine.

Secularism is simply a viewpoint that disclaims religion; what it embraces, though, may be rational or not. And the absurdities of the left stem precisely from its irrationality--its pervasive emotionalism, its insistence on doing whatever "feels right," its contention that there are no fixed truths, its credo that morality is anything one wishes it to be. The left maintains that no objective principles exist to validate moral judgments. From its multicultural equalization of all societies--savage or civilized--to its belief in an indefinable, "evolving" Constitution, the left rejects the logic of objective standards and enshrines the arbitrariness of subjectivism. Thus, what the left's opponents should disavow is not secularism per se, but rather the replacement of a religious variant of unreason--blind faith--with a secular variant: blind feelings.

The real alternative to the leftist claptrap is a morality of reason. Such a morality begins with the individual's life as the primary value and identifies the further values that are demonstrably required to sustain that life. It observes that man's nature demands that we live not by random urges or by animal instincts, but by the faculty that distinguishes us from animals and on which our existence fundamentally depends: rationality.

Krauthammer is right to attack the emotionalism of the loony left, but he enters his battle half-armed, doing the cause of objectivity more harm than good. In doing so, he shows how desperately the armament of reason is needed in the arena of ideas.

-- CAV

Crossposted to the Egosphere

Updates

6-5-05: Fixed a typo, HT Adrian Hester.